Sheila Kunkle 
Cinematic Cuts [EPUB ebook] 
Theorizing Film Endings

Editing has been called the language of cinema, and thus a film’s ending can be considered the final punctuation mark of this language, framing everything that came before and offering the key to both our interpretation and our enjoyment of a film. In
Cinematic Cuts, scholars explore the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings, analyzing how film endings engage our fantasies of cheating death, finding true love, or determining the meaning of life. They examine how endings offer various forms of enjoyment for the spectator, from the momentary fulfillment of desire in the happy ending to the pleasurable torment of an indeterminate ending. The contributors also consider how film endings open onto larger questions relating to endings in our time. They suggest how a film ending’s hidden counternarrative can be read as a political act, how our interpretation of a film ending parallels the end of a psychoanalytical session, how film endings reveal our anxieties and fears, and how cinema itself might end with the increasing intervention of digital technologies that reorient the spectator’s sense of temporality and closure. Films by Akira Kurosawa, Lars von Trier, Joon-Hwan Jang, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Jane Campion, John Huston, and Spike Jonze, among others, are discussed.

Tabella dei contenuti

Preface

Acknowledgments



Introduction: On the Subject of Endings


Sheila Kunkle



1. Resolution, Truncation, Glitch 19


Hugh S. Manon



2. The Banality of Trauma: Claire Denis’s
Bastards and the Anti-Ending


Hilary Neroni



3. The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Played: Desire, Drive, and the Twist Ending


Ryan Engley



4. Retroactive Rupture: The Place of the Subject in Jane Campion’s
In the Cut


Fabio Vighi



5. Love, Loss, Endings, and Beginnings: A Psychoanalysis of
Rust and Bone


Juan Pablo Lucchelli



6. Cinematic Ends: The Ties that Unbind in Claire Denis’s
White Material


Jennifer Friedlander



7. When One Becomes Two: The Ending of
Catfish


Rex Butler



8. The Satisfaction of an Ending


Todd Mc Gowan



9. The Too Realistic Cut: Gaze as Overconformity in
Blue Velvet


Henry Krips



10. The End of Fantasy as We Know It:
Her and the Vanishing Mediator of the Voice in Film


Sheila Kunkle



11.
Melancholia, an Alternative to the End of the World: A Reading of Lars von Trier’s Film


David Denny



12. Cut or Time and American Cinema of Thought-Affect: Cuts of Failure in John Huston’s
Fat City


A. Kiarina Kordela



13. The End of (Self) Analysis: The End of Kurosawa’s
High and Low


Brian Wall



14. The Final Failure in
The Dark Knight Rises


Slavoj Žižek



15. The [“End”]


jan jagodzinski



Contributors

Index

Circa l’autore

Sheila Kunkle is Associate Professor of Individualized Studies at Metropolitan State University and the coeditor (with Todd Mc Gowan) of
Lacan and Contemporary Film.